Last season’s Mulberry show was at Guildhall in the City, with all the bells, religious relics and nobility of old London. For Spring/Summer 2017, designer Johnny Coca offered a different experience, as he took over a printworks in the gritty Docklands area south of the capital, where the setting was a bare concrete floor.
“The venue was interesting as a concept, because everything was in line: the boy blazers and print machines - there were interesting contrasts,” Johnny explained.
Interesting too was the focus Coca put on details, as square, open, window-like spaces down the length of the runway helped put a visual focus on bags large and squishy or smaller and square, with dangling straps to emphasise their ergonomic qualities.
The striped blazer, as worn at Oxford and Cambridge boating regattas since way back when, was a key Mulberry item, its vertical lines appearing on jackets or as decorative vertical patterns on skirts and dresses. That worked well with the concept of a printing press and also gave a strictness both to tailoring and more fluid, softer dresses.